The lost navigatorhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.18/the-lost-navigator
Before Parkinson’s, my father never needed to consult a road map. His dresser and bathroom sink counter are covered in notes, long lists of words in an agitated scrawl. The words extend into the margins, curl up the sides, shrink into pinpoints. I squint; they squint back. I ask my father about them, and he clicks his worn front teeth together and giggles, without explanation. Maybe he doesn’t understand me. I wonder if the lists help his memory. I stuff a few of them into my pocket, a memento of this stage of his life, then transfer them to my suitcase. But when I unpack after the flight home, I can’t find them. Perhaps they slipped out of my pocket unnoticed, much the way my father seems to be slipping out of my life.

When his Parkinson’s worsened, my parents moved to a retirement center. I take my father on walks down the hallway, leading him by the hand so he doesn’t get lost. He used to have a phenomenal sense of direction. After church, he took us on drives into the country, navigating the gravel roads by instinct and the position of the sun. No street signs for guidance, acres and acres of plowed prairie the color of daylight, an occasional farmhouse with a bleached barn — nothing like my mountainous Colorado home. Dad never needed to consult a road map. I inherited his orienteering skills: In the Colorado Mountain Club, I’m known for my route-finding.

He was fascinated by trains. From the comfort of his easy chair, with the TV chattering nearby, he’d plot a course across the Western United States and Canada, using the railroad timetables and histories that crowded his bookshelf.

He drove until Mother finally took away his car keys. He didn’t protest or complain. The dopamine-producing nerve cells in his brain would misfire, and his right foot would stomp on the accelerator in heavy traffic. Or the needle of a random thought would get stuck, repeating itself like a refrain from a wrathful gospel hymn, and, muttering and gesturing, he would start conversing with an imaginary traveling companion who was less terrified than we were.

Today, on the phone with him, I can’t quite make out the words. Too much static. My side? His side? Maybe both.

I think he’s saying what he always says when I call and my mother isn’t there and he picks up the phone. “Jane, is that you? Jane?”

I say my name again and again: “Jane, this is Jane, daughter Jane.” I shout my name louder and louder, until I run out of oxygen.

He giggles. “Mom? You want Mom? She isn’t here. I think she isn’t here. I think she … I don’t know where she is. Maybe she is here?” The line crackles with static or the scratching of untrimmed fingernails as his grip on the receiver falters. But his words penetrate. “I love you.”

He drops the phone with a thud. He must be standing in the carpeted living room. I hear an intake of breath, then a click. It could be his teeth grinding as he presses the receiver again to his lips. Another click, with more bite this time. The line dies, with an interminable buzz. I have this routine memorized.

A few days later, I’m in the grocery store, inspecting the bananas, when an elderly man shuffles by, chin stuck to his sternum, bowed legs stiffer than a bucked bronco rider, barely gaining ground. It’s my father’s gait, that peculiar Parkinson’s shamble. I mutter, probing my absentee father with unanswerable questions. The woman rifling through the bananas stops, stares at me, grabs her son’s hand and pushes her cart toward the lettuce stand. Before I know it, I’m standing outside in the sunshine, reassured by the snap of my bicycle lock, the pinch of the shoulder straps on my stuffed pack, the copper burnish of autumn’s ephemeral foliage.

Before he moved into the care center full-time, Mother left him there twice a week, so she could run errands. If left alone in the apartment, he would turn the burners on, scorching empty pans, and raid the refrigerator repeatedly, devouring the fruit in the vegetable bin as if he hadn’t eaten in weeks.

I take him on one more drive, past the lake where we used to picnic before his confinement to a wheelchair in the care center. Shielded from the city by forested hills, the sunlit lake reflects the rusting hues of late autumn. Dad dozes in the seat beside me until I nudge him and point. Wide-eyed with childlike astonishment, he gazes at the lake as if seeing it for the first time.

It is December when Mother awakens me with a call on the nurse’s cellphone. His face is turned toward the curtainless window beside his bed, toward the rising sun, she whispers. “He looks so young, not one wrinkle.” I can hear the wail of a passing train in the background. “It’s carrying him off.”

Jane Koerner of Fairplay, Colorado, scattered some of her father’s ashes in Rocky Mountain National Park, where the family vacationed throughout her childhood.

]]>No publisherEssaysPeople & PlacesColorado2014/10/27 04:00:00 GMT-6ArticleGathering strength from the Continental Dividehttp://www.hcn.org/issues/44.15/gathering-strength-from-the-continental-divide
A summer in the Rocky Mountains helps a child learn to stand up against the bullies in her life.The Continental Divide of my childhood rises up the moment I spy the fractured, uplifted horizon formed by the Rocky Mountains. Ahead lies Longs Peak, and the log cabin my family has rented for the summer. Ahead lie weeks full of freedom and possibility.

Left behind, so close to Missouri it barely qualifies as Kansas: my neighborhood in Prairie Village, neither a prairie nor a village in the 1950s, but a post-war housing development on the outskirts of Kansas City. In Prairie Village, a chain-link fence keeps me out of the concrete creekbed, troops of boys dispense vigilante justice to outlaws, and gangs of girls gather in their bedrooms to smother their Barbie dolls with dresses that beautify their bald, featureless bodies.

My dolls reside in cardboard shoeboxes, three beheaded corpses to a casket.

The girls make fun of me. The boys label me 'it' and hunt me down in the forsythias. See Jane kneel. The diamonds in the fins of her eyeglasses are made of plastic. Her laughter is as fake as the tulips in Mrs. Jensen's milk can. See Jane beg half-heartedly for mercy as the boys lay her down in ant-infested crabgrass, tie her by the ankles and wrists to stakes, and leave. It is 98 degrees. Jane does not deserve to die like this. What is her offense?

'You're a girl,' shouts Cousin Charles as he flees.

In Rocky Mountain National Park, the mountains shelter me from harm. They pinch the sky into a faint ribbon, shutter our meadow in intermittent shadow and silence. One mountain distinguishes itself from the rest of the range with its singular height, flat top and precipitous east face: Longs Peak.

From the front window of our cabin, I study Longs Peak in the crystalline brightness of morning as elk graze in the meadow below. At this time of day, the mountain seems closer and less formidable than it is. In the graying dimness of a gathering storm, it retreats -- a puzzle with missing pieces. When the clouds finally lift, the mountain is dusted in snow. Sometimes it emerges from the mist, its dome gold or polished silver. Similar delights await me atop the hill behind our cabin, once I've scrambled through the jungle of ponderosas and boulders.

I wait until the kettle on the wood-burning stove whistles. Preoccupied with breakfast, Mother forgets to bolt the back door, and I slip out unnoticed, Huck Finn making his getaway. I am not prepared for the steep gravel. Instinctively I lean outward to counteract the ankle-turning slippage, and I side-hill like the elk do when they ascend from the meadow to the forest. Hummingbirds buzz by in flashes of iridescent green. Ponderosas soar beyond my range of vision, their uppermost branches lost in the sky. Lichen-splattered boulders look as if they could come to life at any moment and speak -- trolls from the underworld warning me away from the forest. I am not afraid. I will climb a boulder and when I reach the top, I will shout triumphantly at the top of my lungs, letting the whole world know of my achievement. I reach for a handhold and then another, my feet secure on the bottom shelf. Half way up, the lichen sponge me off. I pick myself up, dusting off the gravel, and hike beyond the boulder. On the other side, a ramp leads to the top.

I am not afraid of the height. The chipmunks have crowned me queen of the boulder, their forepaws extended for the royal dispensation. I share the crumbling biscuit I stuffed into my pocket before departing, but it fails to satisfy their hunger, and they scamper into my lap and stand on their haunches, scratching at my jacket. I could shake them off but they are my loyal subjects, and I am their benevolent benefactor.

'Lunch time,' my father shouts. 'Mom baked chocolate chip cookies.' The search party has caught up with me. I do not want to be rescued.

The rest of the summer, my scrambles are confined to the summit of our log cabin -- until I am caught and ordered down. From then on I sit on the front steps after breakfast, waiting for the elk to descend from the forest or Longs Peak to emerge from the morning mist. I can be patient. My father, a Western American history buff, has given me a nickname that sustains me not only throughout the rest of the summer but throughout the school year and well into adolescence. At lunchtime, when the cheerleaders at the table start debating over which shade of lipstick -- Cherry Kiss or Peach Blush -- will bag the most suitors, I keep my opinions to myself. Who cares? I am Jane Clark, Precocious Explorer.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesEssays2012/09/14 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleWhy I never hike alonehttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/why-i-never-hike-alone
After a fallen boulder pins her leg to the ground, a hiker learns the hard way how important it is to hike with friends, or at least to leave notes about where you are going.

The boulder was the tallest in a field of tabletop-size stones, seemingly undisturbed by the passage of centuries. It had the stature to have borne witness to a solstice ceremony at Stonehenge, a human sacrifice at Teotihuacan.

I must have brushed it with my right elbow when I looked back to check on my friend, Drew. We had just climbed some unnamed peak in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, and he was making his way down -- in running shoes -- testing the trustworthiness of each step, or so I hoped. It wouldn’t take much to launch a missile attack that would sweep him off the cliff below.

One second the boulder stood upright; the next second, it toppled, pinning my right leg. The shock of the blow threw me on my back, and the weight of the boulder registered instantly in a tsunami of pain. My right leg was caught below the knee in a tightening vice.

Stifling a scream, I sat up and pushed. The boulder did not budge. I pushed again, encouraged by a tremor that suggested a lessening of resistance, a possibility of release. Wishful thinking. I leaned back, pressed my buttocks into the boulder underneath to maximize my leverage and rammed the rock on top with a hip and shoulder butt. The rebound knocked me flat and the boulder bore down, crushing more calf muscle.

I’d heard Drew’s shouts two hours ago when I scrambled up the chimney to the summit ridge. He’d had to duck to avoid some flying pebbles. Could he hear my shrieks now? Another friend had long since disappeared over the next rise, no doubt racing for the truck. Would my screams reach her? I probably hadn’t shrieked this loud or this long since my mother gave birth to me.

Barb arrived first and knelt by my side, watching helplessly as I flopped on my back, exhausted by the pain. The slightest movement on my part increased the pressure on my leg. Barb barely weighed 100 pounds -- no contest -- with a ton of quartzite.

I heard the click-click-click of advancing hiking poles as Drew approached, panting. He dropped the poles, knelt beside me and shoved with all his might. The boulder tilted towards me. I cursed in three languages and wailed from the pain, the fear. We were three and a half miles from the car, 2,700 vertical feet up. It would be dusk by the time my friends hit the road, hours after sunrise before the arrival of a search and rescue team. The steep, rocky terrain ruled out a helicopter landing.

Drew studied the position of the boulder from every conceivable angle. Then he squatted as if he were competing again in a collegiate wrestling match. Relying on the laws of physics rather than blunt force, he braced himself with his muscular thighs, hugged the boulder tight and pushed with his arms and chest. The boulder gave slightly, shifting in the right direction, until finally, at last, there was just enough space to drag my leg out. I rolled up my shredded, bloody pants leg, expecting to see exposed fibula. I was numb below the knee. The skin was torn in several places, the calf double its normal size, but no bone protruded.

I swallowed a pill from Barb’s supply of Percocet and another from Drew’s, and they got me up on my left leg, one on each side of me. Using their shoulders as crutches, I hobbled 100 feet down the talus, to a snowfield. They packed some snow in my rain jacket and wrapped the jacket around my calf, now the size of a watermelon. Three hours later, they bundled me into the back seat of Drew’s pickup for the one-hour drive to the only medical clinic within 50 miles, in Lake City, Colo.

Next morning, the orthopedist in Gunnison examined the X-rays. “You’re lucky. No broken bones. One inch higher and I’d be scheduling a knee replacement. One inch lower and I’d be reconstructing your ankle joint with plates, screws and a bone graft.”

“How long could my leg have withstood that much weight?” I asked.

“An hour maybe. Then we’d be amputating -- not that there’d be much to amputate at that point.”

He showed me how to check for impaired circulation, a dangerous side effect of massive swelling. I followed his instructions religiously. Two weeks’ confinement in a wheelchair with my raised leg frequently wrapped in ice, followed by another two weeks on a walker seemed inconsequential, a mere inconvenience to be borne with a sense of humor.

Two years later, whenever I hike in shorts, strangers on the trail sometimes ask about the crater in my calf. If they’re from Texas, I tell them I was kicked by a moose. If they’re hiking alone, I recount the real story as a cautionary tale. Do not hike off-trail by yourself.

Jane Koerner is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). She lives in Fairplay, Colorado, and still hikes, though with greater humility.

]]>No publisherRecreationWriters on the Range2012/06/29 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticlePulling an Everett Ruesshttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/pulling-an-everett-ruess
When you're out of work and homeless, it's inspiring to remember young wanderers like Everett Ruess, even if he never returned from his mysterious sojourn in the canyon country of Utah.After six months without a job, I wonder how I will support myself. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, mummified inside a contorted blanket, my dog hunched over my right hip in the posture of a turkey vulture. In the dark it's hard to tell if he's watching over me or waiting for me to expire.

The truth is, I have more alternatives than most Americans my age. I've got enough camping gear to equip a Himalayan expedition, some savings, and a Honda that gets 35 miles to the gallon. And I have a descendant of wolves for company; as long as he's around, I don't mind sleeping out under the stars alone even during this time of year.

I could pull an Everett Ruess if I wanted, and disappear in southern Utah, sending out cryptic messages once in awhile to reassure my friends without providing too many clues. If both polar ice caps melt in my lifetime, I do not want to be rescued.

"I prefer the saddle to the street car, and the star-sprinkled sky to the roof, the obscure and difficult trail leading into the unknown to the paved highway," wrote Ruess to his brother in Los Angeles, shortly before his disappearance in the fall of 1934.

Young, restless and idealistic, Ruess traveled alone and on foot. In one of his last letters to his brother, he marveled, "In my wanderings this year, I have taken more chances and had more and wilder adventures than ever before. And what magnificent country I have seen -- wild, tremendous wasteland stretches, lost mesas, blue mountains rearing upward from the vermillion sands of the desert ... cloudbursts roaring down unnamed canyons."

He was last seen alive in Davis Canyon, near the confluence of the Escalante and Colorado rivers.

Vertigo always pulls me back from the edge of a tempting precipice, and I know better than to camp in a wash during thunderstorm season. The deer flies in June will drive me crazy, but I can zip them out of my tent. Winter is more worrisome. South-facing alcoves capture solar energy in the daytime, but the nights are long and cold. If I adjust to the climate and absence of human company, I will shed my white skin in the spring and camouflage myself in a coat of wind-swept sand and let the sun engrave me in whorls of ancient wisdom.

In time, I imagine that my circadian rhythm will align with the avian sonar system, and I will rise in concert with the descending notes of a canyon wren. I will heat my oatmeal beneath the fan of flapping raven wings and learn to tolerate deranged hair and self-inflicted skunk odor. I will acquire a taste for chokeberry tea, rodent jerky and abandoned coyote kill, defend my freeze-dried vegetables from thieves by storing my cache in a pit dug with a Vibram-soled heel.

When the greening of the cottonwoods signals the onset of summer and the urgency of returning to the canyon rim, I will obey the command and emerge. The civilization I left behind may have recovered its senses by then, and people my age will be able to make a living wage without compromising all of their principles.

The good thing about turning 60 is that I have enough life experience to resist despair. And if the recovery fails to materialize, I know I can bide my time in canyon country. I can restore my faith at the Sistine Chapel of rock art overlooking Horseshoe Canyon in Canyonlands National Park. There, the shrouded "Great Ghost" hovers over an assemblage of deities dwarfing the human figures.

According to a Ute elder, pictographs like this are sacred, and in the olden days, before his religion was outlawed and his people forcibly marched onto reservations, a boy would be taken to a particularly potent site and left there for three days and nights, until an animal came to him in a dream. An eagle signified courage and wisdom. A buffalo transmitted great strength; a hummingbird, humility. A visit from a coyote was a gift for the whole tribe to celebrate -- Coyote could predict life and death.

With no tutors to guide me, I may have to sit at the feet of Great Ghost for a fortnight or more, drinking in the silence as I listen for the flutter of wings.

Jane Koerner is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). After living on a succession of friends' couches, she has landed in Fairplay, Colorado.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesWriters on the RangeEssays2011/11/08 16:51:18 GMT-6Article Adventuring on Colorado's big peakshttp://www.hcn.org/issues/43.13/solo-adventures-on-colorados-big-peaks
A woman finds solace and delight in climbing Colorado's highest and most challenging mountains.I rank them by altitude and tackle them one set at a time: the 200 highest, then the tricentennials. I'm told I was the first woman to climb Colorado's 100 highest peaks; mathematical precision makes the task seem manageable.

There are 638 mountains in the Colorado Rockies over 13,000 feet high. I'd climb them all, if my joints allowed it. I want to possess these mountains as they possess me. I want to know everything about them -- the density of their forests, the color and scent of their flowers, the angle and texture of their rock.

After my divorce, I climbed for the exercise, burning off bad memories like calories, transforming grief into muscle. "What's the rush? Are you training for an ultra-marathon or something?" a friend asked. He'd turned back at timberline, exhausted by the pace I set. In my 40s, I had legs of granite, my heart and lungs were a 200-horsepower engine that propelled me upward at 1,800 vertical feet per hour. Sixty-five heartbeats per minute, 3,900 per hour. I've recorded each triumph in my notebook, like a bird-watcher, marking the date and initials of my companions. For the solos with my dog, the most loyal companion of all, I spelled his name backwards: God.

Mummy Mountain, early August: I glanced back at dilating clouds and picked up the pace as I scrambled up the last 200 feet of the summit block, beating the lightning-charged hailstorm to the top by 10 minutes. Then I outran the rest of the storm by choosing the right shortcut back down. Back at camp, a Boy Scout leader coveted my spot for his troop of 10. I was happy to comply, confident I could hike out in time to have dinner with my parents, who'd rented a condo for the week. I told them I was hiking with a friend. How could I explain that even though I was alone for the first time in my life, I wasn't really alone?

Pole Creek Mountain, late August: Eight miles up Lost Creek, I found a safe place to cross, where migrating elk had flattened the bank. Their muddy hoof prints provided stirrups for my splash-free leap to the other side. Several hundred feet below the summit, elk tracks helped me again, guiding me safely through a cliff band.

Mount Silver, mid-September: The whoosh of a low-flying hawk awakened me from an afternoon nap in the tundra. It was three hours back to camp, and the sun would set in two.

When I told my mother how many peaks I bagged the summer after my divorce, she said, "You love the mountains more than you will love any man." I was furious, even though she was probably right.

I hadn't recovered from a recent blind date in Denver.

We met at my favorite Mexican restaurant. He ordered chips with hot salsa, and said, "I reserved a room for you at the motel across the street."

"I'm not driving home tonight. I'm camping in the mountains." There were too many jalapeños in the salsa; I drained my second glass of ice water.

"It's May. There will be snow up there. You're alone."

"My tent and sleeping bag are in my trunk." I looked at his watch -- mine vanished in a ravine during a particularly arduous climb -- and excused myself before the waitress brought the main course. "Got to pitch that tent before dark."

I never told him about my trophy collection, which was probably bigger than his. It certainly covered more territory: Pico Asilado, hidden in a back valley, like its name suggests; Gold Dust, Treasurevault and Lucky Strike, where I detoured around one collapsed mineshaft after another, dragging my mutt by the collar to keep him out of the arsenic-tainted water. Kit Carson and Ulysses S. Grant on opposite ends of the state (one of those ironies that comes with naming mountains after conquerors); while Arapaho and Navajo share a ragged ridge in the wake of their defeat.

Only a few of the mountains in my collection bear women's names. My favorite: Silverheels, the nickname of an anonymous prostitute who nursed the miners of Fairplay through a smallpox epidemic. After contracting the disease herself, she covered her ruined face with a veil and vanished.

I climbed Silverheels twice: Once before the divorce, testing my wings, then afterwards with sympathetic women friends. On the way down, we wrapped our jackets around our hips and rolled down the mountainside like a spilled sack of potatoes until we tumbled unharmed into a bed of moss campion and alpine forget-me-nots. Kathleen unbuttoned her shirt. Mary started giggling. I ripped off my clothes and they followed suit, a pack of alpha females intoxicated by our collective strength.

I climbed until the vision in my left eye clouded over, and my ophthalmologist scheduled cataract surgery. I climbed until a boulder toppled over, pinning my right leg beneath a ton of immovable weight. Now there's a permanent dent in my calf -- a badge of courage, or foolhardiness.

I'll keep climbing, until my heart gives out, and they find me beside the trail, belly up, my grinning skull a whimsical warning to those who dare to venture out on their own.

At age 60, Jane Koerner is still climbing but at a much more sensible pace.